An easier way to use apostrophe-schemas with anonymous site visitors

[Tom Boutell]

We all like working with schemas, and it's frustrating that it's not
obvious how to use them on pages that face the public.

To make this easier, we've added a tiny feature that allows you to ask
Apostrophe to load all the CSS and JS a logged-in user would get.

This saves you the trouble of using apos.requireScene, a nifty but
tricky piece of frontend code that tends to break because we honestly
don't use it often enough in our own work.

The new, simple technique is this:

Just set...

req.scene = 'user';

... In a page loader function.

If you want it all the time for your whole site, you can do it in a
project level page loader function that doesn't actually care what
req.page is. However, keep in mind that it does take some time to load
extra CSS and JS on a page, and so it's usually best to choose to use
schemas on relevant pages, such as donation pages, purchase pages,
etc.

"Wait, how do I use schemas in my own code in the first place?"

Good question. The schemas module documentation has the answer:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/apostrophe-schemas

You can also check out the apostrophe-donate module for a great
example of using schemas independently, to handle public-facing forms:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/apostrophe-donate

There's an apos.requireScene call in apostrophe-donate for backwards
compatibility. So just keep in mind that you can set req.scene on the
server side instead, and it's a simpler and less risky strategy that
we'll be following in A2 0.6.

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THOMAS BOUTELL, DEV & OPS
P'UNK AVENUE | (215) 755-1330 | punkave.com